Aaron Michael Skolnick: The Entertainer at MARCH

By SARAH CHEKFA February 26, 2025

All photos by Cary Whittier, courtesy of the artist and MARCH

 “Everyone wanted to be Lux Lisbon, even the guys. I don’t believe that any of them wanted to fuck her, how could you want to? She was just so beautiful, so cool, but she didn’t care and that’s why it worked. She wasn’t meant to live long; in a way she had to die to help us believe,” the artist Aaron Michael Skolnick titles his painting of Lux Lisbon, the most coveted of the five ethereal Lisbon sisters that haunt the 1993 cult classic bildungsroman-turned-Sofia Coppola-directed film, The Virgin Suicides. In the painting, Lux’s eyes are closed: in the throes of ecstasy? Or maybe they are closed because she is enjoying a deep REM sleep, dreaming of colors that go together — or, perhaps most likely, they are never to open again, eyelashes kissing skin in the permanent slumber of death to which she is doomed. We will never know, can only guess, educatedly, based off what we know about Lux Lisbon from The Virgin Suicides, a perspective which is already devastatingly narrow, because the novel is strictly from the perspective of a group of anonymous teenage boys who obsess over and mythologize the sisters, celebrities local to their lives in their own right (“When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them,” Jeffrey Eugenides, the author said in an interview).

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Everyone wanted to be Lux Lisbon, even the guys. I don’t believe that any of them wanted to fuck her, how could you want to? She was just so beautiful, so cool, but she didn’t care and that’s why it worked. She wasn’t meant to live long; in a way she had to die to help us believe, 2024, Oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches. 
 

Through a series of paintings, garments, photography, installation, and a triad of live performances that constellate to form The Entertainer, Skolnick playfully examines this intrinsic unintelligibility of celebrity persona and the consequential malleability of its interpretation from afar, emphasizing the role of the audience as integral to celebrity, even hopelessly intertwined with it. It goes something like this: the feedback loop of Celebrity outputs a persona via performances, songs, photographs, interviews, endorsements, media coverage, social media, and the like; the audience reacts to this diffuse ephemera — loving, hating, imitating, judging — reactions which translate into the inputs that recalibrate the persona that is output, over and over again (for at least 15 minutes, according to not-Andy Warhol).

There can be no celebrity without audience. The audience projects onto their idol, and their idol is always performing, even when they are not, for they cannot escape the gaze of the audience, cannot help but react to their reaction. Many of Skolnick's paintings feature famous people just out of focus, identity distorted, blurring between their own likeness and the artist’s like edges of a cloud melting into the sky. These shapeshifters are almost always arranged on flat planes of less-than-opaque colors — pinot noir, conifer green, midnight starless sky — that ripple with static but remain ultimately bare, congealing them context-less in a gelatinous membrane of Jell-O that enables them to metamorphose as they please. In their placelessness, the shapeshifters can belong anywhere and everywhere, eternally versatile and adaptive to market demands. Among them: Al Parker, Chloë Sevigny from Kids, Eminem, Brooke Shields from Pretty Baby, and Sinead O’Connor, many of whom have spoken on fame and audience alike: “They can trigger me. But they'll never figure me out” (Eminem). “I think the hardest thing for me was really knowing who I was” (Brooke Shields). “The audience is the most important person in my life artistically” (Sinead O’Connor). 

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Me and Al 2 (Transforming into Al Parker), 2024, Oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches 

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Me & Chloe 1 (Transforming into Chloë Sevigny from Kids), 2023, Oil on linen, 12 x 9 inches 

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Me and Sinead 1 (Transforming into Sinead O’Connor), 2024, Oil on linen, 12 x 9 inches

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Study for the “Architecture of the American Ridiculous” Part 3, 2023-2024, Aluminum bleachers, astroturf, cardboard cutouts, found fabric, thread

In the center of one of the two rooms lies a set of bleachers on a considerably sized patch of astroturf, calling to mind that scene in The Virgin Suicides wherein Lux and one of the boys, Trip, have sex on the football field on homecoming night. Trip takes her virginity, but he loses his ability to see her as a fantasy. She is real, after all: her too-realness lulls him out of his trance. He loses interest in her. She kills herself. The interplay of idol and audience can have catastrophic, irreversible, even fatal consequences.

Against the wall, behind the bleachers—an object upon which one type of audience sits to observe one type of game (football)—lean stretcher bars, similarly aluminum—an object used to construct that which another type of audience is wont to observe (a painting). Painters use stretcher bars to ensure their canvas is taut, and one of the benefits of using aluminum over traditional wood is that the metal will keep its shape, precluding the canvas from deforming, obfuscating the painting’s true form as time unwinds. No painter wants their work to decay, just as no celebrity wants their image to deteriorate: thus, the attempt to exert control. The critic Philippa Snow has written that celebrity can be seen as a kind of art-object, and I am inclined to conjecture that Skolnick agrees.

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Study for the “Architecture of the American Ridiculous” Part 4, 2025, Photo Tex print, aluminum stretcher bars, muslin, thread
 

It is notable that the bleachers are facing away from the stretcher bars: the audience is not privy to the behind-the-scenes of the celebrity’s construction of their own image. Yet they find a way in, anyway: the entertainer has no choice but to engulf their audience — Skolnick has designed cardboard cutouts of the entertainer himself, in various getups, assuming various personas, to occupy the bleachers. From the literal term “astroturf” originates astroturfing as practice: the duplicitous act of making an orchestrated public relations campaign seem like it has originated organically from the members of the public. Celebrity, it might be said, is inversely astroturfed by its own audience: as audience expectations and reactions ingrain into the celebrity’s understanding of the consequences of their own actions, the  subsequent modality of their being automatically filters through this lens. Our presence catalyzes the production of celebrity persona in an always-devouring ouroboros. Rather than being “true” to “themselves” — whoever that might be! — the celebrity self-adulterates. We the audience always seem to grasp for the real person behind the persona. Who is the REAL Madonna? Yet perhaps persona is what is most real, after all: “A fake so real it's beyond faith,” reads a phrase Skolnick has stenciled on the wall behind the bleachers. A misheard Hole lyric, I am told: our reality is silhouetted by misunderstandings and projections that feel more real than facts.

It’s almost impossible to skirt around the astroturf to observe the work that surrounds it without stepping on it. We’re always told not to touch the art, let alone step on it, but perhaps on some level that’s what Skolnick wants us to do — or at least make conscious the fact that we as audience are always closer to the entertainer than we presume ourselves to be. “Stars — they’re just like us,” the saying goes. From the perspective of the celebrity, it contorts: “The audience — it’s stuck inside my head and I can’t get it out.”

Skolnick planned a series of three performances to accompany the work on display, one of which assumed the form of a bingo night, at which he took on the double role of both host and esteemed bingo caller. Bingo, not unlike celebrity, is a game founded upon luck. What are the chances of winning, a girl sitting next to me wants to know. “It’s up to God and Jesus,” replies Skolnick, or rather the character he’s playing (“The entertainer is me, I guess,” he admitted in an interview with Two Coats of Paint). “I just think if I ever had bingo I wouldn’t notice it,” she says. It’s hard to see what you’ve become when the next transformation is always looming, teasing on the horizon. We get to talking and she almost immediately confesses to me that she’s a paid actor — I had been thinking she might be — and that she’s paid to act obvious about it. I start to wonder who else is a paid actor. In bingo, everyone is cordially invited to daub the free space in the point of convergence of the card. Everyone is at the very center of their own universe (main character syndrome has no remedy: we cannot be cured of our own subjectivity). I win one round: Skolnick sniffs my “aura” and bestows upon me a prize that aligns with it: a pinecone all the way from his own backyard upstate, which really feels like it belonged to one of the trees featured in a series of landscapes of luminescent green forests he exhibited at MARCH in the fall of 2022. Identities layer like tissue paper, one against the next. What once was, never fully erodes (a pine cone will fall from the sky when you least expect it).  

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Me and Jackie 1 (Transforming into Jackie Bouvier Kennedy), 2023-2024, Oil on linen, 60 x 48 inches
 

Skolnick learned to sew to create many of the objects in this exhibition. Among them: a giant Nirvana shirt, several miniature T-shirts emblazoned with Sonic Youth and various other band names — (no T-shirt will fit just right — is it possible to call yourself be a true fan when you’ll never know the real person-sans-performance?) — and a muslin replica of just one of Jackie Kennedy’s trademark elbow-length gloves which hangs on the aforementioned aluminum stretcher bars and conjures an instance in which one of Jackie Kennedy’s real gloves was stained with blood, the day that her husband John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lady Bird, who succeeded her as First Lady, wrote in the first entry of her White House diary of the tragic spectacle: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy's dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood - her husband’s blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights - that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” The replica of the bloody glove is nowhere to be found in the exhibition, but in Me and Jackie 1 (Transforming into Jackie Bouvier Kennedy), Jackie stands stunned, fixed into oil by Skolnick in a state of unbelief, even sick fascination. Who would want to transform into this woman suspended in the ice of tragedy? None but the entertainer himself, who is more adept at assuming the countenance of anyone but himself. Unable to commit to his own visage but once in the entire exhibition, his eyes wet like glass in fog, as if daydreaming about his next impersonation. He stares off into space…

Aaron Michael Skolnick, Self Portrait as the Entertainer, 2024, Oil on linen, 10 x 8 inches

One of the most popular, and perhaps also one of the most beautiful myths about outer space is that when you see a star in the night sky, it is already dead. The myth was debunked, but some part of me can’t help but continue to believe in it anyway. WM